1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to monitoring of electronic devices and more particularly relates to displaying a physical view of an electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Complex information systems commonly include several devices, each working together to provide various data storage, communication, and processing services. Such systems are commonly used for business. Where such systems are involved in business and financial transactions, reliability is typically a particular concern for system administrators. If an error occurs on such a system, there may be a substantial financial impact to the company.
Commonly, system administrators use system monitoring applications to measure the availability and to ensure the accessibility of the information system resources. Monitoring applications commonly use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) ping packets and other network monitoring commands to monitor responsiveness of the various system resources.
Common applications may provide an abstract graphical display of the network indicating the status of the various resources. For example, a network monitoring application may assign a box or circle called a “node” to represent a resource in the network. Commonly, such nodes are colored to indicate the status of the resource. For example, a green node may indicate that the resource is available, and a red node may indicate that the network management application cannot access the resource.
However, typical monitoring applications do not provide a physical description of the monitored device. Furthermore, monitoring applications also generally do not provide information regarding the physical location within a large system of the monitored device.
Typically, monitoring systems only collect data about the accessibility of the system resources. Additionally, monitoring systems do not provide a system administrator with information about the physical location or physical configuration of the system resources within the system.